Words&Dirt

“‘Isn’t it like a threat, though, this thing, hanging over us? I look at it some days, hanging over the city, over us, and it makes me shiver.’

‘It used to make me catch my breath, sometimes, I’ll give you that. What can I say, Virisse? Promises take many shapes, and the more…momentous they are, the more they might look like threats. All great promises are threats, I suppose, to the way things have been until that point, to some aspect of our lives, and we all suddenly become conservative, even though we want and need what the promise holds, and look forward to the promised change at the same time. So we have that great grey shape hanging over us, over the parliament itself as a reminder that this is where the final decision was taken, this is where we made up our minds. And it reminds us that there are powers and forces beyond us, that we are in the process of surrendering our full authority in this, and of taking a great new leap.’

‘It is too late?’

‘What? I’m sorry, my love, I didn’t––’

‘It is too late? Can we still unmake our minds?’

‘Well, no, it isn’t. We can all change our minds, right up until the last moment.’

‘Must there always be forces beyond us?’

‘Oh, my love, there always have been. The Sublimed have been there for ten billion years, the Elders too; we are just one species, not here for the longest time, then here for a while, then gone again, just like everybody else. But we’ve always known there is something worthwhile is just being ourselves, in being us as well as we can.’”

––The Hydrogen Sonata, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 388

“Verres’s corruption struck at two of his most passionately held convictions: that Rome was good for the world, and that the workings of the Republic were good for Rome. This was why Cicero could argue with a perfectly straight face that the stakes in the coming trial were apocalyptic. ‘There is nowhere, no matter how distant or obscure, within the boundary of the encircling Ocean, that has not suffered from the lust for oppression which drives our people on,’ he warned. If Verres were not convicted, then ‘the Republic will be doomed, for this monster’s acquittal will serve as a precedent to encourage other monsters in the future.’ Magnificently over the top though all this was, there was more to it than a mere lawyerly desire to make the flesh creep. For the sake of his political ideals, and his own self-respect, Cicero had to believe what he was saying. If the Cursus rewarded greed rather than patriotism, and if a man such as Verres could emerge triumphant over a man such as himself, then the Republic was rotten indeed. Here was an argument that Cicero would cling to all his life: that his own success was to be regarded as the measure of the health of Rome. Genuine principle fused seamlessly with inordinate self-regard.”

––Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland, loc. 2134-40